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    By Dawn's Bloody Light: A Fairy's Tale, #0
    By Dawn's Bloody Light: A Fairy's Tale, #0
    By Dawn's Bloody Light: A Fairy's Tale, #0
    Ebook86 pages1 hourA Fairy's Tale

    By Dawn's Bloody Light: A Fairy's Tale, #0

    By DeAnna Knippling

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    About this ebook

    Three women.  One serial killer who has access to the supernatural. 

    He can scare them...but he can't stop them from taking revenge.

    A small Midwestern college town.  A series of murders that ape the Jack the Ripper killings.  Then Laney Miller is butchered just after dawn in front of a second-hand bookstore.  The one witness didn't see anything...except Laney getting dragged out of her car and murdered by an invisible force.

    One that carries a straight razor.

    It's a town that has attracted the weird and strange as far back as the eighteen hundreds.  Since then disappearances, murders, suicides, and kidnappings have only grown worse.  Especially targeted are a group of local girls that carry the same face...

    Laney's face.

    Laney's girlfriend Joy and her friends decide to find the seemingly-supernatural killer and take him down before he strikes again.  

    In as violent and bloody a manner as possible.

    By dawn's bloody light...they will have revenge.

    A novella-length horror/paranormal suspense story to kick off the Fairy's Tale Series, coming soon!  Book 1:  ONE DARK SUMMER NIGHT, August 2017.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWonderland Press
    Release dateJun 26, 2017
    ISBN9781386703648
    By Dawn's Bloody Light: A Fairy's Tale, #0
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    Author

    DeAnna Knippling

    DeAnna Knippling writes darkly twisty tales that blend myth, history, current events, and the weird and macabre. Her novels The House Without a Summer, The Clockwork Alice, and The House of Masks explore haunted pasts, current nightmares, and future possibilities, in rich and atmospheric detail. A fan of vintage pulp, gothic horror, sharp-minded mysteries, and reality-spanning SF, she crafts mind-bending tales that linger long after you put the book down. Find more of her work at www.WonderlandPress.com.

    Read more from De Anna Knippling

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      By Dawn's Bloody Light - DeAnna Knippling

      Copyright Information

      By Dawn's Bloody Light

      Copyright © 2017 by DeAnna Knippling

      Cover image copyright © 2017 by Outsiderzone | Depositphotos.com

      Cover design copyright © 2019 by DeAnna Knippling

      Published by Wonderland Press

      All rights reserved. This books, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission from the author. Discover more by this author at www.Wonderlandpress.com.

      By Dawn's Bloody Light

      Prologue: Laney

      The Midwest, 1988.

      By the pricking of my thumbs,

      Something wicked this way comes.

      — William Shakespeare, Macbeth

      It’s 1988 and it’s summer. Pete owns a bookstore in a small Midwestern college town. It’s a used bookstore. That’s not where he makes his money. Obviously.

      Actually, I’m not sure where he makes his money. But that’s something he was always saying: The Page Turner isn’t where I make my money. Snort. Obviously. Knowing Pete, he sells pot for a living and uses the bookstore to conceal enough of the profits that he doesn’t get busted by the IRS, which is the important thing when you’re running a very small drug empire in the ’80s. I mean, you can bribe the local cops but you can’t bribe the IRS.

      Pete is the crooked man who lives in the crooked house. He looks like someone took his joints apart and put them back together at a slightly off-kilter angle. He chainsmokes and his cigarette is always sagging downward. Even when he’s making a dramatic gesture with the tip, it’s limp and shuddering between his big-knuckled yet frail and crooked fingers. He’s like sixty. He’s a writer, the kind that talks more horseshit than does actual work. But he does publish a giant newspaper worth of poetry and fiction every year, on April Fool’s Day. He owns the local second-hand bookstore, which means I give him way more money than I should on a regular basis, and he’s in the same writers’ group as Joy.

      Joy’s my girlfriend-slash-roommate, as in, when the wrong people are around we quit necking. I think the world of her. Aside from that whole writer thing, she’s perfect. The big question is: do I think she’s going to make it as a writer? No. I do not. (Not that I’d tell her.)

      She’s the type of person who writes ten words, stops, and waits for inspiration to hit her again. She goes to coffee shops and orders the fancy drinks that cost three times as much as plain coffee. She doesn’t really even read that much, and when she does it’s stuff for one of her English classes.

      I read a lot, but I never wanted to be a writer. Just a nurse. It’s a good job, being a nurse. You’re always gonna be in demand. You’re also always gonna be taken for granted. Nobody gets taken for granted like a nurse. We’re invisible magic-workers. And yet as far as patients are concerned, the only thing we do is show up late with pain meds.

      It’s 1988 and it’s almost a hundred years after the Jack the Ripper murders and I wouldn’t care less, only someone in our unnamed small Midwestern town is pulling kind-of-copycat murders, the kind where someone gets opened up from groin to neck and their sex organs fondled from the inside. It’s summer. I mentioned that. That means that in this college town, all the strangers (i.e., the students) have gone home. Except the ones in summer school. The whole town goes from like ten thousand people to just about two thousand in the summer. Which at least hypothetically reduces the number of suspects.

      It’s late June and two women have been murdered already but I don’t care because it’s ten to six in the morning and almost time to go home and I’m smoking outside the break room door of the nursing home, standing so that the breeze doesn’t take the smoke back inside. The cement pad just outside the door is cracked in half. It doesn’t go anywhere, it just ends. It’s just there for us to stand at and smoke. There’s a red Folger’s can two-thirds filled with butts on the cement pad under the overhang.

      In ten minutes the next shift will start their report while the night shift answers call lights. In about forty minutes I’ll go home.

      The sun starts rising in the east. I stand there and smoke, staring out into nothing, waiting for the light to hit my face. When the light hits my face, I say to myself, I’ll go back inside and get my ass in gear. Night shifts are the worst, because you can’t get used to them. You keep getting rotated on and off them—at least when you’re a nobody student nurse like me. I’m not even shadowing tonight. Just changing diapers and passing out glasses of water.

      I finish the cigarette and throw the butt into the Folger’s can. The sun’s still hanging there, not moving.

      I was born in this town, I’ve lived here all my life. It’s a weird shit town. Correction: even without the university it’s a weird shit town.

      Whenever the sun hangs in place, that means something’s coming.

      I look around. The other thing you see when the weird shit is coming is old junk, tree branches, trash—it kind of looks like an amateur modern art installation. Or some kind of voodoo doll shit…it’s creepy. (I remember one time when snowmen with gears for eyes showed up all over town. Like two hundred of them. The snow looked like it had been patted down with claws, not gloves…the next morning they had melted down to metal stick-figure frames…the morning after that they disappeared.)

      Outside the door is the

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